According to women inside Iran who are
campaigning to attend the matches as spectators, Iranian authorities
reneged on promises that they could attend and restricted ticket sales
to men three days before the opening match on Friday, June 19.
Security forces took up positions around the stadium, inspected
approaching cars at checkpoints, and diverted women away. In flyers,
political hardliners compared women spectators in stadiums to
“prostitutes.”

Iranian authorities have banned women and girls
from stadiums hosting football matches for decades, but only recently
extended the ban to volleyball—in flagrant violation of the principle of
gender non-discrimination in sports.

I don't get the "prostitutes" argument. Is the idea that the women will get all sexually excited from seeing semi-naked men playing volleyball? Would male veiling help? General modesty in male dress? Or is modesty a one-sided game, where women are expected to always play defense and men offense?

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell
is not simply a victory for the Obama administration — and for the
millions of Americans who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for their
health coverage. It is a sweeping, crushing blow for conservatives who
seek to use the courts to undo what President Obama and a Democratic
Congress accomplished. “In a democracy,” Chief Justice John Roberts
implicitly scolds the activists behind this litigation, “the power to
make the law rests with those chosen by the people.” He then offers a
broad statement to future judges called upon to interpret the Affordable
Care Act: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health
insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must
interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and
avoids the latter.”

Thursday, June 25, 2015

It's almost a truism that online debates (say, on Twitter) lack nuances, and usually I just accept that and slither on. But on some days I get sick of it all.

Then I grumble, in my silent room, to an audience of zero, that it's not "both sides do it" if the number of those deeds is ten million on one side and ten on the other side. Or rather, the "both sides do it" argument doesn't make the two sides equally at fault.

Neither is a mass murder equal to punching your neighbor in a quarrel over a tree on the border of your lots. Yet if you take that parable to political writings you spot several examples where the difference in the severity of what has been done is utterly ignored.

When I really get going in my sermon I point out to the interested walls that numbers do matter. If some policy is going to hurt, say, half of all Americans, and another policy is going to hurt one American in every ten thousand, the two are not the same in their total numerical consequences.

A more nuanced conversation would allow that and would also look at the severity of the consequences for each individual, to come to a proper conclusion about how, for instance, the resources of activist movements should be allocated. At a minimum it would open the discussion to more relevant details.

Finally, after a sip of of water, I tell the empty room that it's a very good idea to ask this simple question: Compared To What?, when people tell us about the high rates of something (criminality, illness etc.) for one group of individuals (check the rates for the other groups before getting all excited) or about the health risks of some treatment or non-treatment. For an example of the latter, those who talk about the health dangers of the contraceptive pill or abortion usually don't tell us how high the dangers of getting pregnant and giving birth might be.

All those aspects are invisible elephants, stampeding over the logic of the debate. But if you point them out you get stampeded! It's not fun, even for someone who slithers fast.

In April, Mr Short, originally from Leigh, near Wigan, but now living in Greece, told the magazine New in Chess that men were simply better at things like chess and driving, while acknowledging that his wife had “a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do”.

Ah, so sweet. When Short makes equal allegations about chess and driving as things men simply do better he fails to look at the statistics on car accidents. If I was as lazy about research as Nigel seems to be I'd point out that the only fair condensed interpretation of those statistics is that women are better drivers than men.

But because I'm not that lazy, I'd have to point out that we need to control for lots of stuff when comparing female and male drivers, including the average number of miles driven per various time units and so on.

Short doesn't do any of that thinking for driving (where he ignores the actual evidence and goes by his prejudice) or for playing chess (where he ignores all the myriad reasons which exist to explain why fewer women than men play chess or why fewer women than men play professional chess, except for the one that men might simply be innately better at chess).

Reading about the massacre of nine innocent people in Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, last week, made me physically too sick to write about it (given that I was already feeling poorly), but I followed the coverage, both in the official media and on Twitter. And fierce coverage it has been, with many beautiful and important articles.

All that should be in the foreground of the discussion, just as misogyny should have been kept (and perhaps was kept) in the foreground in the Eliot Rodger case.

But both cases also shared other aspects: Easy access to guns made the numbers of dead people much greater, the online hate sites helped in the radicalization of both killers and the acts also shared a flavor of terrorism, depending on how terrorism is defined.

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